The "disappointing" benchmark mentioned in the article is a shame for GigaOm who published it and for Microsoft who paid for it. They compare Citus with no HA to CockroachDB and YugabyteDB with replication factor 3 Multi-AZ, resilient to data center failure. And they run Citus on 16 cores (=32 vCPU) and the others on 16 vCPU. But your point about "beefy machine" shows the real advantages of Distributed SQL. PostgreSQL and Citus needs downtime to save cost if you don't need that beefy machine all days all year. Scale up and down is downtime, as well as upgrades. Distributed SQL offers elasticity (no downtime to resize the cluster) and high availability (no downtime on failure or maintenance)